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Not possible, Li says.
“I don’t really think you can master an instrument,” he says by phone during a recent tour stop. “There’s always things to learn for anybody, and for me definitely.”
Li, principal songwriter of the London-based DragonForce, had that mindset while he created the band’s fourth record, Ultra Beatdown. The man leading the resurgence of six-string shredding actually consulted other guitar players — even ones who don’t play metal — when formulating his next batch of tunes.
“It makes the music more interesting,” Li says of incorporating the ideas he gleaned.
The results make Ultra Beatdown easily DragonForce’s most varied offering yet. It’s especially notable in the pacing; not every song is played at mach speed. Far from turning soft, Li says it’s about expanding the music’s possibilities.
“It’s been hard work really,” he says. “This time we took even longer to write the songs — trying to make things different and add things.”
It’s not what he would call a pleasant experience, either.
“The enjoyable part is the ending, when it’s all finished,” Li says. You have to be brutal and honest with yourself; if it’s not good enough, you have to make it better. Not just in performance but songwriting and mixing — everything really.”
Li has seemingly taken that philosophy to heart since he first started playing. Unlike the classically-trained Totman, Li taught himself by watching instructional videos and listening to the likes of Megadeth and Joe Satriani. Quite a start for a man who has recently become a “Guitar Hero.” DragonForce’s song “Through the Fire and Flames” on the video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is widely considered the most difficult track to play in the game’s entire series.
Not that Li or anyone else in DragonForce is getting an ego boost from it.
“We all think we suck and say we need to get much better,” he says. “No one thinks they’re that great.” Post a comment
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